Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Digital Photo Processing

Perhaps some of you are getting the idea that I am finding excuses not to blog about our summer vacation, possibly because you might believe that the task of combing through nearly 7 thousand photographs to illustrate our five weeks (in two parts) is such a daunting task. You would be correct.

In the meantime, as a leadup, and coutesy of Mike, I am providing some before and after comparisons of photos taken with Mike's Nikon at the recent Geek Dinner -- the raw images which I posted earlier, and those same images after Mike took them and did some digital processing.

The white balance and color tweaks were done in Lightroom 2. Noise reduction and smoothing was done in Photoshop.

Do-Ming and Jill - unprocessed. Check out the good looking guy on the left.

Do-Ming and Jill - enhanced. Now you can tell that the better looking one is actually on the right.

Corwin and Ben - unprocessed. Just a couple of geeky kids.

Corwin and Ben - enhanced. Now you see the true nature of the NDS-induced zombies.

Mark and Glen - unprocessed. Apparently just a couple of regular guys.

Mark and Glen - enhanced. Now you can see the guy on the left is an Evil Genius, and the one on the right is hiding a Green Lantern insignia.

Just a reminder for when you try these techniques out on your own photos -- since these processes make changes to the image file, you should always make a copy of the image, and only work with the copy. That way, you keep your original file intact.